SOURCE: “The Backward Look of Bellamy's Socialism,” in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 21-36.

In the following essay, Cantor observes Edward Bellamy's “insular, parochial, Christian, uniquely nineteenth-century American” socialism.

Edward Bellamy, born in 1850 of a long line of Connecticut and Vermont ancestors, was the frail and precocious son of a New England country parson in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The father, a Baptist minister, was amiable, indolent, good-natured, of a more liberal religious bent than his strong-willed wife. Maria Bellamy was a religious zealot whose spirit burned with the fires of an uncompromising Calvinism. Possessed of the unbending qualities of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, she dominated the Bellamy household, pressed books—but never useless fiction!—upon her son, and made sure that the daily family prayers, twice-a-day Sabbath devotions, and Sunday school educational requirements were observed. In...